kool-eggs

In the 90s, I dyed my hair with Kool-Aid. Last year, I dyed yarn with Kool-Aid. And this year, we're dyeing Easter eggs with Kool-Aid. I mean, why not? It smells fruity and awesome. It makes me nostalgic for hot summer days at the pool. Time to make some Kool-Eggs.

Not only will the Kool-Aid make your kitchen smell super sweet, you'll get some fantastically vivid results. You can usually pick up five Kool-Aid packets for $1.00, so this is a fun and inexpensive way to change up your annual egg dyeing adventures. Kids will find this soooo exciting.

So let's start with the eggs. Every year, I seem to forget exactly how long to boil them, so here are the directions I use. To make things extra simple for you.

After your eggs are ready to go, it's time to find some small containers and get your Kool-Aid packets ready to go.

This is really all you need, because Kool-Aid has citric acid in it. No need for vinegar! Add one packet of Kool-Aid to 2/3 cup of water and stir. That's it. I used both lukewarm and cold water and it didn't really make a difference with how our eggs turned out. Keep in mind that Kool-Aid powder is pretty messy, so you should do all of the mixing over your sink to prevent your counter tops from turning different colors the next time you wipe them off. (Not that this happened to me or anything.)

Finally, you'll need to round up a willing helper or two to do the dipping.

You don't have to leave the eggs in the dye cups very long before you'll see them become quite brightly colored. The eggs will smell fruity at first but after they dry, they smell and taste like normal hard-boiled eggs.

I will warn you about a couple of colors/flavors that had less than desirable results. Lemonade on its own comes out too light (as does the Pink Lemonade) and Grape will quickly turn dark gray-ish. I remedied this by mixing things up a bit. To get a nice yellow, use one packet of Lemonade mixed with a quarter to half packet of Orange. To get light pink, use one packet of Pink Lemonade and add a little bit of Cherry or Strawberry. To turn the gray/brown Grape egg into an indigo color, add some Berry Blue to the mix.

Here's what your Kool-Eggs will look like.

Hope you have a super cool time making your own rainbow of Kool-Eggs. :)

Suhweet. I plan on having egg dying adventures with both my nephew and the child I nanny next week. I think Kool Aid eggs definitely needs to be in the mix. Also, dying yarn with Kool Aid, tres magnifique!

you are brilliant. but i'm sure you know this. ;) we are totally trying this. also... THANK YOU for telling me how to boil eggs. no. i'm serious. you have no idea how much i was stressing out about that. LOLxoxo

I LOVE THIS IDEA! I have actually used Koolaid in my stamping projects......as a scratch and sniff deal (will be posting a project how to do that next week hopefully on my blog.... really easy and smells great too on your projects/cards! But on eggs I would have never thought it.... love it! Will definitely try this out! Thanks for sharing! Here is a link to my blog - hop by some time and follow me, I am now following you!

Odd. I tried this with Cherry and got very poor results. Tried adding a little vinegar to see if that would help. Nope. Tried leaving it in for a long period of time (with and without the vinegar). Both times the egg developed a vivid red skin that would wipe/wash off. Wonder if our hard water is a factor.

this is a great idea, thanks, and i learned a new tip that i will share with everyone, take wire whiskers and place you egg into the inside of them and use to dip your eggs instead of tongs or spoons, they are much easier to handle and they get evenly colored :)

I am going to try this with my Head Start class. And if it works with yarn, I am going to try it will coloring rice. I have colored rice with alcohol and food coloring but I hate the idea of alcohol and the smell.

hi Danielle – my eggs actually did not taste fruity/like kool-aid at all, but I wondered the same thing. good luck!

and Poopsie's Pottery – LOL, awesome. in high school, I dumped 3 packs of kool-aid into boiling water (no sugar), poured that into a soda bottle and dipped my hair into it for a few minutes. it lasted *forever.* ;)

Thanks for the idea! I had the same problem as an earlier commenter that the kool aid was blotchy and left a film that wiped off. I think it's probably because we were doing hollow eggs (for confetti filled cascarones) that hadn't been boiled??? They're not nearly as pretty as your eggs, but we had a great time. I'll have to try them with some boiled eggs soon. :)

Jessica – love the shaving cream idea. And yes – I've never tried Kool-Aid with hollow eggs. And condensation/cold/wet eggs can cause problems with dyeing (even with normal Paas dye.) I have the best luck with dry, room-temp eggs.

hey jen thanks for the reply about condensation but i meant after they have been dyed and eggs go back in the fridge...once you take them out and the eggs start to get condensation on them then, is the koolaid sticky because of the sugar? we tend to have a 'buffet' if you will of all the pretty eggs and sometimes the eggs get condensation...so just wondered if they get sticky...thanks!

I stumbled across this on facebook (someone pinned it through pinterest) & HAD to try it this year! The only difference I did with our colors, (for orange & blue) was adding a half packet extra & they came out fabulous! For one egg, since I noticed the purple ones were dark-ish, I dyed it blue first then put it in the purple & it came out better. I don't know if it's the same blue you used, but I used the blue raspberry lemonade one. This was SUCH an awesome idea. I love it.

I came across your idea on Pintrest. IT IS AMAZING! My daughter and I dyed our eggs yesterday and they were perfect.The best part was there was no smelly vinegar and very little mess. The colors were great! Thank you very much for sharing!! :)

Doing this right now with my three girls. They are loving it . And it does smell so delicious. We had to work on the grape. Color a little bit. Experimenting is great. We have created all kinds of color. Thanks for the great idea.

Just did this with my kids - found your blog thanks to pinterest. We are in love with this method. We did 18 eggs tonight and decided we need to make a ton more tomorrow just so we can play around some more. And the smell is a great bonus!

Have you tried this taking the shell off and dying the white part to make devil eggs? I saw on pinterest where they dyed the white part different colors then filled with yellow deviled yolk. I wonder if it would taste funny?

This was so wonderful! Thank you for sharing this! We had a great time doing this tonight and it smelled so good. Will be using this method from now on! Oh, by the way, Kiwi Strawberry was a nice pink as well. Our store didn't have all of the flavors you used. Thank you for sharing!!

We just finished dying our eggs. Everything came out great. We couldn't find Berry Blue, so we bought a package of Mixed Berry. It gave us the most gorgeous deep robin's egg blue. We also tried the Ice Blue Raspberry, but it didn't work well at all. Happy Easter!

I was hoping to have your permission to post about this on my blog. I would have everyone come to your site for the instructions, but was hoping to use your photo that has the packets and eggs in it. you can see my blog here before you decide: http://changingtheworldpebblebypebble.blogspot.com/ such a "kool" idea!

What a great idea! We did this for the first time this year and they turned out so much better then the kits you buy in the store. Plus, they smell YUM! I didn't put enough Berry blue into the grape, so those eggs came out black, but they look really cool! ♥ this and will do this every year now! Thanks!:)

Did this tonight. My daughters loved it -- and the nice smell was a plus too. :) We tried to experiment to get a "nice" purple by mixing the red and blue, but sadly our egg just turned brown. LOL oh, well. The other colors turned out fabulous! Thanks for the idea!

Just finished dying our eggs with kool aid. I started with brown and green eggs from our own chickens. Some of the colors worked great, but many of them had a film that peeled off. Some of them still had color under that film, but it was just strange. LOL

Thanks for the inspiration! I included your post in my Take a Peek @ My Pinterest: Easter Edition post. Hope it brings you some traffic!http://www.amytriedit.com/2012/04/peek-my-pinterest-quick-lil-easter-post.html

I think another idea with the "grape" color is maybe not use the whole packet and add the berry blue in place of it. Since Kool-aid is so cheap, it would be fun to just be creative with several colors!

Love this idea...last year I actually died the egg without the shell. Made for a fun Easter table. I wonder if this would work as well without the shell. I love the idea of not having to use vinegar. Thanks for sharing.

Just did this with my almost 4 year old! She LOVED it!!! Just wish I had made a better list before buying the Kool Aid, we didn’t get as many different colors as I wish we would have. But still had fun! Thanks for the idea!

I just finished coloring my eggs. I must admit, I was unsure if this would work... and it does, beautifully. I added a little orange to the lemonade, and it is nice bright yellow...also added a drop or two of blue food color to the grape because the first one turned out gray. AND, it smells wonderful.

Not sure if anyone posted these suggestions already, but for yellow I used peach-mango kool-aid and got a great golden yellow. Next time I probably wouldn't use the whole pkg so that it was a bit lighter. And for purple, I tried your way but still was kinda grey, so I mixed 1/2 cherry and 1/2 mixed berry(blue) and got a great purple. Last one, I used the mixed berry(blue) because no stores by me had the one you suggested. The only difference was the mixed berry comes out a real vibrant shade of turquoise. Thank you so much for this idea, fabulous!

Just did this with the kids tonight and they loved it. They kept asking if they could drink the koolaid when we were done. For yellow we used pineapple flavor koolaod and it came out awesome. We will be doing our eggs this way from now on. Thank you! :)

I had a couple issues that I ran into: we ended up with spotted eggs because we set the wet eggs on an old towel and it adsorbed the color and left spots on the bottom of the eggs; too much undissolved powder in the water makes the eggs bumpy; too much undissolved powder on the bottom of the container makes the coloring congeal on the eggs and wipe off when taken out of the dye; the orange didn't turn out very bright by itself; the cherry was very pale, almost orange looking (next year I'll try black cherry); the strawberry turned into more of a pink than the pink lemonade/cherry mix.

A nice surprise, though, was how pretty the Berry Blue, turned to a very beautiful bright turquoise blue, and lemon-lime, turned to a pretty mint green, for me.

Other than that, the colors came out great. Sure, we have some slightly spotted eggs, but oh well...they cool pretty cool!

I just colored my eggs, and they turned out great! Strawberry Kiwi and Ice Blue Raspberry Lemonade turned out the best. The Ice Blue one made the eggs the color of robins eggs. Very beautiful and so easy.

Had a wonderful experience with the kool-aid, everything turned out great. Something I did try that worked pretty well: 1 packet blue raspberry lemonade with 1/2 packet grape made a pretty good dark purple

I am doing this right now. I got a pretty bright blue with Blue Raspberry Lemonade and a pretty green with Lemon-Lime. I am so excited about the kids seeing them at the hunt today. Thank you for this post.

Kool-aid is now my preferred way to dye Easter Eggs, thanks to Jen Renee! This was our second year using your method. Like J. Patel noted, it has become a lot harder to find the powdered kool-aid packets. I struck gold my local Fry's (Kroger) supermarket. Here are my color notes in case it helps anyone else. Watermelon and Strawberry Kiwi both make a pretty pink. Mango makes a golden yellow. Pina~Pineapple makes a nice lemon yellow. "Great Bluedini" makes a nice teal. Black Cherry makes an oddly attractive dark orangey red, almost burnt sienna color. Cherry, Strawberry, and Tropical Punch all make the same orangeish red. (I remember getting a better red from Cherry last year, so maybe they messed with the formula?) I used blue raspberry in 2014 and got a great blue, but had no luck finding it this year.

I'm orthodox and my mom always bought these little red dyes from the local bakery. They would always get super messy and hard to clean. This seems like the modern way to do it and more kid friendly. Thank you!